A Quote by Carl Sagan

The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. . . . Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty.

Carl Sagan

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Carl Sagan
American - Scientist
November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996

That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.

Carl Sagan

We are living in a society that is totally dependent on science and high technology, and yet most of us are effectively alienated and excluded from its workings, from the values of science, the methods of science, and the language of science. A good place to start would be for as many of us as possible to begin to understand the decision-making and the basis for those decisions, and to act independently and not be manipulated into thinking one thing or another, but to learn how to think. That's what science does.

Ann Druyan

Part of science is the questioning of authority, absolute freedom of ideology. The Soviets did some very good science, but when science ran into ideology, it had trouble. Science flourishes best in a democracy.

George M. Whitesides

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Jacob Bronowski

People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.

Mark Walport

Mathematics has two faces: it is the rigorous science of Euclid, but it is also something else. Mathematics presented in the Euclidean way appears as a systematic, deductive science; but mathematics in the making appears as an experimental, inductive science. Both aspects are as old as the science of mathematics itself.

George Polya

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

Mark Walport

It's a common perception that science and religion are mutually exclusive. But there are many scientists who would consider themselves to be spiritual people. Not only that, but in the case of climate change - a scientific issue with strong moral implications and difficult decisions to be made - it's essential to connect the science to our values. And for many of us, our values come from our faith.

Katharine Hayhoe

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

Thomas Carlyle

I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.

J. Allen Hynek

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

George Santayana

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.

Kurt Vonnegut

Here in the U.S., we've made democracy into a science. A cold, impersonal science.

Jon Stewart

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over.

Edmund Husserl

The necessary precondition for the birth of science as we know it is, it would seem, the diffusion through society of the belief that the universe is both rational and contingent. Such a belief is the presupposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask: Upon what is this belief founded?

Lesslie Newbigin

There are two kinds of science: The black science and the white science. The science of weapon production is the black one. Working in this category of science is a great betrayal to humanity!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

A Quote by Carl Sagan

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